YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Artificial Unintelligence

"has never been the bottleneck"

The tell of an unhinged anti AI rant that pulls only to the worst case most negative viewpoint.

Ironically this reads like output from an LLM trained exclusively on bluesky

I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening.

Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.

And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.

I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy.

LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true.

It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening.

It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.

This is someone's vent post.

AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid.

The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.

> human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work.

This rings true.

I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers.

Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.

Alternative title: Cognitively tired unc goes on rant after experiencing change of job responsibilities

This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.

Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.

That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)

Completely off topic, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that this blog's central column is built as a... <table> Good old times. Definitely not vibe coded, though.

> So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride.

Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables.

To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring.